بنام خداوند جان و خرد ... کز این برتر اندیشه بر نگذرد

I have borrowed the “God of Life and Intelligence” concept from our most famous history teller Ferdowsi, as a perceptual tool to paint a picture of how more and more intelligent life forms (microbes, plants, animals, humans, cultures and civilizations) have appeared on Earth, and what this trend means for our future in Iran and elsewhere.

If you are an atheist, GoLI can mean a unique set of accidental circumstances that have consistently and continuously favored the evolution of life and intelligence on Earth. If you are a believer, GoLI can be a non-accidental influence that has guided life here, over the past 4 billion years. For an agnostic, it does not make a difference, because GoLI is a demonstrated “bias for life and intelligence” on Earth, whether it is an actual entity or a fortuitous confluence of cosmic forces.
 
Confluence of cosmic forces inadvertently aligning to evolve into an increasingly intelligent life on Earth, leading to us Sapiens, who are now discovering the universe from the subatomic to galactic, would be more miraculous than any god of mythology. Just imagine the tangled tree of existence (from the big-bang to the soup of photons to the gases and dust to the stars and planets) growing a tiny leaf on a tiny branch. Then consider that leaf as it turns into a mirror that looks back at the tree, and grows a mind to analyze the cosmic existence, and grows a consciousness to realize that it exists, and finally falls in love with its own reflection. That is pure magic!
 
As an amateur researcher of history, mostly of Iran, in 2008 I authored a manuscript in Persian titled Farsi-Nameh (summary of Iranians chronicle from Persepolis to Jamaran). Since then, I have been publishing articles about Iranians past, present and future. In recent years, I have also tried to better understand the major trends in world history, and not just Iran and Mid-East by reading more widely and researching through the literature that aim to find a general evolutionary trend in history, perhaps starting even from a biological and genetic background all the way to zoology and anthropology.
 
Using the Ferdowsi-inspired concept of “God of Life and Intelligence”, I will try to explore the following three questions in these GoLI series.
1. How and why has natural selection formed the evolution of more and more intelligent species?
2. Has that same selection mechanism affected the evolution of human species and societies?
3. What does that trend mean for the future evolving path of our life on Earth?
 
In a random world, intelligence is of no value!
 
Life on Earth is a giant competition and it has evolved through relentless natural-selection of more and more complex and intelligent species. However, an intelligent atheist cannot ignore a fundamental difficulty with this trend: Why have the supposedly random events on Earth resulted in the appearance of the most orderly and organized intelligent beings? Isn’t the entropy (disorder) supposed to gradually increase rather than progressively decrease, within a closed system?
 
In a random world, intelligence is of no value! For example, if we visit a completely “fair” casino and play a game of chance, it doesn't matter how intelligent we are, at best we would break-even while losing all our time and energy.
 
Relying on intelligence within a random world can actually cause more harm than good; because the 2nd law of thermodynamics dictates that all actions to seek order in a closed system, actually cause more disorder. In the example of casino, the "smart" people who think that they can figure out a random game and win, keep playing and actually lose little by little to the casino owner, who like the 2nd law of thermodynamics, takes a bit from every bet.
 
Astonishingly, the human brain and the brain of so many other intelligent animals are hard-wired to treat our world as non-random and orderly. We constantly look for biases, and our success over millions of years surely indicate that there are so many orderly biases on planet Earth that we and our ancestors have been able to identify and exploit to our advantage.
 
Now, god forbid, if we allow that our world is breaking the 2nd law, which can open a Pandora's Box or even a path to god! But then why wouldn't our world be chaotic and disorderly, like all the other hellish planets? Why on Earth, does life and life-forms appear to swim against the wave of entropy, which continuously ruins everything from Venus to Pluto? Even if large and orderly molecules (like amino acids) could have randomly appeared in the early Earth waters, what made them connect and collude to create more and more organized and even “intelligent” replicating molecules, rather than succumb to the random fluctuations of temperature, chemistry and radiation?
 
Scientists’ current answer to the above question is that: We have no idea how life has started on Earth. That is the biggest secret of nature, along with how the entire world started at the big-bang! Even a simple microorganism is so complex that it is still not understood how the coding (DNA), engine (metabolism) and body (membranes) could spontaneously and simultaneously get together and function in perfect harmony. The complexity and order in a single microbe is more than the entire Milky Way galaxy, but single-cell life appeared rather quickly after Earth cooled down 4 billion years ago.
 
However, the good news is that strictly speaking, life on Earth is not breaking any thermodynamic laws. Earth is not a “closed” thermodynamic system, but a small gem within our vast Milky Way galaxy that contains some 300 billion stars that are constantly creating both disorder (entropy) and Gibbs free-energy, at tremendous scales. Based on latest scientific estimates, there can be 100 billion planets in the Milky Way too, with 10 billion turning around stars similar to our sun, within a “habitable” orbit. Such an orbit places them not too far from their sun to be too cold, and not too close to be ravaged by heat and radiation.
 
To be habitable, a planet should be rocky, with ample water supplies. A molten metallic core is also needed to provide a magnetic field for protection against cosmic radiation. Then, to be stable enough to support intelligent life over the long term, an Earth-like planet also requires other more subtle features. For example, it would need a stable moon at the right orbit to prevent wobbly movements and sever climate fluctuations. Also, a “good Jupiter” would be helpful to attract and collect most of the space junk that can pummel the little habitable planet.
 
Even with all those stringent conditions, the number of habitable Earth-like planets is estimated at millions! But what is millions of little rocky planets compared to billions of giant stars in the Milky Way? Each star on average is a million times heavier than Earth. In terms of shear mass, the habitable planets would be no more than 0.0000001% of Milky Way. Furthermore, the total mass of living biomass on Earth is estimated at only 0.0000000001% of our planet’s mass.
 
Some of the Gibbs free-energy that is released from the fusion nuclear reactions in the sun is continuously trapped in Earth’s atmosphere. Entropy and disorder increases immensely in the sun where that free-energy is generated, but can be locally reduced on Earth, where radiation is captured by photosynthesis.
 
Hence, it is statistically and thermodynamically plausible that billions of stars in the Milky Way that are continuously creating vast amounts of free-energy, could have contributed to generating a relatively minute amount of life and even a smaller amount of intelligence, without breaking any physical laws. However, life still requires a universe that is fundamentally not “fair” and random. Our universe (or its universal laws or fictitious god) is clearly biased towards generating local order and encouraging its growth in complexity.
 
Zoroaster the Persian prophet, 3000 years ago surmised that good and bad are in constant battle on Earth. He observed that sometimes good wins and other times bad, but that good seems to be slightly stronger than bad. Behold that even a small bias (say 51% to 49%) can yield huge dividends over 4 billion years of playing! But let’s not forget that our lifetime wins come at a price, that is the god of death and disorder winning (say 52 to 48) elsewhere.
 

Playing favorites since the Big-Bang

Playing favorites appears to be the modus operandi of our universe (universal laws or god). To understand that better and establish a trend, it is worth a look at the mother of all favors, the Big-Bang. Big-Bang generated large sums of energy and matter, seemingly in a global uniform explosion and expansion, but it actually impregnated the entire new-born universe with local seeds of order ... seeds that were then favored to grow in complexity.
 
Only 1% of big-bang’s output has turned into cosmic dust, stars and galaxies. It seems that 99% has turned into “dark” energy and dark matter, about which we don’t know anything. Even a smaller fraction of that dust turned into little planets and even a smaller percentage into habitable planets. In one of those planets (Earth) after 4 billion years of evolution, we have a tiny diamond in the rough and a smart monkey who is trying to understand the universe!
 
Strictly speaking, laws of physics need not apply to a “singularity” like the big-bang. However, ever since that moment of “creation”, no laws of physics (Quantum and Relativity) seem to have been broken. Global entropy and disorder is still increasing, and no god’s active action is necessarily required to allow for our magical existence. All that appears to be in play is a “non-random” universe that has clearly been biased towards generating localized order, rather than just an endless expanse of light and particles with no significant order at all.
 
Those are basic scientific observations, but not an explanation of how and why. The big-bang itself cannot be understood by our physical laws, let alone its “purpose” and final result. Under a different set of universal laws, neither the galaxies nor life on Earth would have emerged after the big-bang.
 
Here on Earth, universe has “created” a miraculous environmental machine that is capable of trapping the sun’s free-energy, establishing a water-cycle, and generating the organic soup for the first life forms. GoLI is not breaking any laws, only bending them locally in at least 2 critical ways: 1- generating seeds of order, and 2- growing more order from those seeds. Both of those tendencies are absolutely required for evolution and the appearance of the smart monkey!
 
Firstly, our universe has allowed for order to emerge at minority locations, at the cost of disorder in majority expanses. For example, the domain created immediately after the big-bang was not uniform in mass and energy; it was filled with numerous seeds of order (higher gravity spots) spread everywhere. Those gravitational biases then acted as growth sites for more mass to accumulate locally. Therefore, as hydrogen atoms emerged from the cooling big-bang soup of photons and quarks, they did not just wander around, but preferentially gathered at those localized higher gravity zones.
 
Secondly and as importantly, order has continuously begot order and been favored to evolve gradually to higher levels, again at the cost of more external disorder. This gradual growth from seeds of order to trees of higher-level orders has been facilitated by the property that, a gathering of existing quantities of order (e.g. hydrogen atoms) has been able to slowly interact and mutate into new emergent higher-quality orders (i.e. stars and galaxies). Similarly on Earth, single-cell microorganisms that lived in close proximity, slowly evolved to yield multicellular plants and animals.
 
The flip side of all that order-generation and life-creation within any location is the need for external trend towards more disorder, i.e. life comes at the price of death. Our god of life and intelligence on Earth is playing the opposite role that is required to balance the universal laws of physics, i.e. the god of death and disorder, on a global scale.
 
Our own human lives and orders on Earth also have meant death and destruction for the others (plants and animals). In fact, the higher-order beings require a more effective way of disposing of disorder, from their within to the surroundings. Our brain (only 2% of our mass) consumes 20% of our energy; hence our head is shaped and equipped with a very efficient cooling system, in order to release the heat (disorder) which is the by-product of all that thinking (order).
 
Our universe is continuously expanding, cooling down and perhaps “dying” very slowly. Our own sun will run out of fuel much sooner (in 10 billion years). A mountain on Earth is reduced to rubble in millions of years. A redwood tree can live for thousands of years. In comparison, humans cannot live much past a hundred years. Higher-order creatures live more complex lives but are more prone to death too, as the amount of disorder and waste that they create internally, cannot be easily handled and often cause irreparable internal damage.
 
Hence, the general universal trend since the big-bang has been based on Birth, Growth and Death. The BGD cycle has been both applicable to the individuals of each order as well as each genre. For example, babies are born, grow and die; as well as species, villages, cities, countries and civilizations.
 
Khayyam the ancient Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher was obsessed with life and death. He could not fathom how god would lovingly create such sophisticated beings (like humans) in the thousands, and then so callously break them one after the other. Perhaps, instead of focusing on the positive aspects of life, he was drinking too much black-market wine and paying too much attention to the trivial fact that, everything dies!
 

The Selfish Gene

Life on Earth appears to swim against the flow of death and disorder, by sustaining its order and even creating higher orders. Three key ingredients are required for this magic: 1- Cellular boundary to separate self from the outside, 2- Energy collection and utilization through metabolism, 3- Intelligent codes (genes) to maintain the recipe of life from one generation to the next.

Single cell organisms appeared on Earth only 0.5 billion years past the planet’s cooling and the liquid water appearance. For 3 billion years after that, the single cell lifeforms ruled the planet, by copying and pasting their genes again and again. Technically, a single cell organism can be immortal; that is as long as it is not consumed by another lifeform or killed by a change in its environment, the single cell creature can simply copy its genes and split its cell into two identical “daughter” cells.

Of course, under environmental change conditions (e.g. temperature and atmospheric composition) the single cells had to evolve and adjust, or face extinction. Approximately 99.9% of all the species that have ever appeared on Earth are extinct now. Therefore, natural-selection and evolution has always been a bloody competitive sport! Genes contain the core information of any lifeform, and their survival or demise has determined the evolutionary success or failure of a creature. Hence, the survival of genes is a matter of life and death.

Selfish Gene is a biological concept proposed by Richard Dawkins for expressing the gene-centred view of evolution. A lineage is expected to evolve to maximize the number of copies of its genes that are passed on, generation after generation; or lose the survival competition. Also, as the competition for gene propagation takes precedence over individual breeding, the more two individuals are genetically related, the more sense (at the gene survival level) it makes for them to behave generously with each other.

In describing genes as being “selfish”, Dawkins does not mean to imply that they are literally driven by any motives or emotions, but merely that their functional consequences can effectively be described as selfish. In other words, evolutionary natural-selection appears to indicate that the genes that are passed on are the ones whose evolutionary consequences serve their own implicit interest in being replicated.

But by designating genes as the smallest “selfish” unit of natural selection of lifeforms, Dawkins does not mean that each gene is trying to maintain its own molecular-self at the cost of every other DNA strand. Rather, he maintains that genes behave as though they are trying to collectively sustain their “genetic kind”. Therefore, Dawkins expects that genes of the “same feather” would be helpful and altruistic towards one-anther, because being “selfish” towards your own kind can endanger your gene’s chances of survival. Hence, being selfless and generous is also explained as part of the survival mechanism of being selfish.

The unit of natural-selection and chronological-evolution for a single-cell lifeform that can continuously duplicate and is theoretically “immortal” can very well be its genes. However, every “order” is expected to demonstrate a different “unit” of evolutionary competition. The “unit” for quarks, atoms, molecules, plants, animals, cultures, civilizations, stars and galaxies would be quite different; but similar trends are expected to exist.

Global evolutionary trends, such as creating orders and higher-orders within an existing order, at the expense of more disorder outside those orders, can also be figuratively characterized by being “selfish”. After all, any self-sustaining entity that has been subject to the process of physical and natural selection should have been “selfish” or would not have survived amid the global trend of increasing disorder (entropy). Hence, being “selfish” can be a connecting thread of governing equations (fractals) that has maintained a global similarity in core behavior and functionality, from the smaller and simpler orders to the larger and more sophisticated lifeforms.
 

Uniform and random systems are not conducive to evolution.

Evolution is the process through which more complex systems arise from less complex ones. Evolution is evident everywhere, but is not self-evident. Why would complexity arise from simplicity, instead of the more “natural” path of devolution and disorder?

How galaxies have formed from the soup of particles, since the big-bang? Why on Earth, life has evolved from simple single-cells to complex human beings? Uniform and random systems are not conducive to evolution. Minor instabilities during the big-bang are thought to have caused the initial gravitational seeds, around which, galaxies grew 14 billion years ago. Similarly, environmental instabilities have favored increasing complexity and biodiversity on Earth, since life started 4 billion years ago. So in a sense, order has emerged from chaos through instability, because that chaos carried the seeds of order from the very beginning.

The “immortal” single-celled creature could theoretically duplicate its “selfish” genes forever, producing two identical daughters from each single mother. Each daughter would be of almost exactly the same character and genes as the mother. Therefore notionally, the single-cells could have competed with one another, through duplication and growth, until one of them would have dominated the entire planet Earth with its “selfish” gene. However, that same immortal quality of a unicellular, to duplicate without limitation, impaired its ability to endure a sudden and significant change of environment. Moreover, as the unicellular populations grew, that change in environment could actually arise from the life activities of the microorganism itself, as its internal “order” generated a multitude of external disorders.

Nevertheless, Earth is a constantly dynamic system; e.g. there is a continuous bombarded by the cosmic radiation that can induce genetic mutations in single-celled organisms. Therefore, the copy-and-paste of DNA has never been exactly accurate! Mutations could “give birth” to new genes and to new cell characteristics, which would pass from mothers to daughters and survive, if they could enhance their chances of survival. Over the billions of years, even the “immortal” unicellular microorganisms have always been subject to change and evolution; resulting in new variations, races and species.

Four billion years ago, when the first lifeforms emerged on Earth, the atmosphere was drastically different from today. There was much more CO2 and almost no oxygen! The first cells thrived on getting their energy from thermal or chemical sources, and used that energy to build their cellular building blocks (genes, proteins and carbohydrates). That early “paradise” lasted for a billion years, until it was dramatically altered with the emergence of photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is the biochemical process that captures the sun’s radiative energy by combing CO2 and water to make carbohydrates, while releasing oxygen as a by-product. Starting 3 billion years ago, with ample sunshine and atmospheric CO2, the microorganism Cyanobacteria mutated to produce sugars through photosynthesis, which made her extremely successful and prolific. The success of photosynthesis eventually released some 1,000 trillion tons of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere!

Oxygen is today considered as the essence of life for all animals which cannot last without breathing every minute of the day. However, from a strictly biochemical point of view, oxygen is a potent biocide (killer of living things). You can use oxygen to kill (oxidize) most organic matter, and that is exactly what happened 2.5 billion years ago to almost all the original microorganisms, when the photosynthesis unleashed by Cyanobacteria dramatically increased the oxygen concentration in Earth’s atmosphere.
 
That oxygen-induced mass extinction is recorded in Earth’s geology as the Great Oxygen Holocaust. Nearly all the “immortal” microorganisms that were obligate-anaerobes died and disappeared. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere dropped and the emergent oxygen in atmosphere reacted with pre-existing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) and dropped its concentration to near zero. The result was a disastrous period of cold temperatures that created the worst ice ages ever (Snowball Earth)!
 
The fact that proliferation of tiny single-celled microorganisms, driven by their “selfish” genes, could impact the entire Earth surface and atmosphere, clearly indicates that around 3 billion years ago a new “unit” of evolution had emerged on our planet. We can call that new unit the “ecosystem” and its playing ground has been the biosphere. It does not mean that the selfish genes stopped working on the evolution of microorganisms; just that a new higher-order (ecosystem) had emerged which comprised of a multitude of the lower-orders (microbes).
 
Eventually aerobic microbes, which could consume oxygen, evolved and established equilibrium versus the CO2 consuming photosynthesis. Free oxygen has been an important constituent of the Earth’s atmosphere, ever since. Due to that vital check-and-balance and many more like that, the story of ecosystem’s evolution has dominated the past 2 billion years of Earth’s biosphere; carrying within it the equally-important subplots of genetic evolution that continuously play underneath all the big and small environmental changes.
 
The story of evolution of ecosystems is not a single-hero saga, but a multi-generational and multi-player grand plot that depends on biological competitions as well as cooperative inter-species links. Those links have fostered biodiversity on Earth, rather than creating a single-species situation. In a biodiverse ecosystem, the waste (disorder) generated by one organism can be nourishment for another, and vice versa. Disorder and waste, which unchecked can kill any single organism, are minimized and harnessed to result in a nearly maximized utilization of energy and resources - constantly in reuse, recycle and regeneration.
 
Looking at a galaxy like our own Milky Way, a similar sort of “ecosystem” formation and diversity is evident among the dust clouds, stars and the lonely central Black-Hole. As though evolution (emergence of order from chaos) has been playing similar musical tunes through a variety of instruments, and throughout an astonishingly wide range of sizes and scales!
 
Billions of years ago, the emergent bio-diversified ecosystems evolved to behave like super-intelligent creatures, although they were literally made of a multitude of seemingly unintelligent unicellular microbes. Under greater scrutiny, each of those microbes on its own-right was also a highly intelligent biological supercomputer. Furthermore, under an electron-microscope, each of those single-cells contained thousands of knowledgeable and evolving genes.
 
The bio-diversified multitudes of ecosystem have proven to be robust “units” of evolution, which have endured many more climate changes, asteroid impacts and holocausts. It is only very recently that the underlying evolution of genes and species has resulted in a “superman” who is busy creating his own ecosystems. This “intentional” global tampering with the biosphere has created a new extinction event (holocaust) that is carrying Earth into uncharted trajectories.
 
Sexual Revolution
 
For 3 billion years, life on Earth merely comprised of single-celled microbes. It was only after the appearance of photosynthesis and oxygen in atmosphere that multicellular and sexual organisms came to dominate, a billion years ago. The fact that the jump from single-celled to multi-celled microbes took 3 billion years is a testament to the stability of unicellular ecosystems, as well as the marked complexity of even the simplest multicellular creatures.
 
Multicellular’s main evolutionary benefit is having its own little ecosystem, complete with multiple types of unicellular tissues, within an enclosed bodily boundary. As discussed, an ecosystem of competitive and collaborative microorganisms had already proven to be stable and robust in dealing with environmental challenges, over the first 3 billion years of life. Similarly, once established, the mini-ecosystem within the multicellular organism proved even more advantageous for survival through the struggles of natural-selection.
 
However, to reproduce, the multicellular organism had to overcome the very complex barrier of regenerating a whole organism (with different cell types) from two half-gene germ cells (sperm and egg). Sexual reproduction required at least 5 distinct features that were absent in the simple unicellular duplication, where each mother single-cell only had to divide into two identical daughter single-cells. Namely: 1- The multicellular organism had to produce sexual cells with half the genes of its whole cells. 2- The sperm half-cell had to fertilize the egg half-cell. 3- The fertilized egg (zygote) had to divide into multiple cells with identical genes (embryo). 4- The embryo cells had to go through differentiations that activated different sets of their identical genes. 5- The differentiated embryo cells had to further divide and duplicate to produce all the different types of cells in the multicellular body.
 
The first multicellular creatures (algae and fungi) were rather simple and had no more than 10 different cells in their body. In comparison, plants have 20-30 different cells and the more complex animals have evolved to have 100 to 150 different cells in our bodies.
 
But what is the evolutionary advantage of sexual reproduction? Why have such a great number of multicellular organisms emerged and were naturally selected after the sexual revolution of 1 billion years ago? The answer lies in the great genetic variety that sexual reproduction can generate, compared to the simple copy-and-paste of asexual doubling of single-celled microbes.
 
With asexual organisms, genes are copied and inherited completely during reproduction through duplication. In contrast, the offspring of sexual organisms contain random mixtures of their parents' genes, which are produced through independent assortment (shuffling of genetic cards). Two sexual parents can theoretically produce an infinite number of kids, with not even two of them being identical! Sex, therefore, has immensely increased the genetic variation and, hence, the speed and vigor of evolution. The pre-sexual Earth’s ecosystems were likely made of only hundreds of single-celled species, whereas the current number of known species is at 10 million.
 
The increased variety of species has created more elaborately connected and robust ecosystems, which have been able to support the evolution of evermore complex and intelligent lifeforms. Under the forces of natural-selection, organisms must constantly adapt and evolve, not merely to gain reproductive advantage, but also to survive while pitted against opposing organisms in an ever-changing environment. Sexual reproduction has been a great advantage, and enabled continual evolution and adaptation in response to co-evolution among species.
 
Equipped with the vast genetic variations of the sexual revolution, plants and animals appeared on Earth and quickly colonized not just the waters, but also all the land masses that were previously uninhabited. From 600 to 66 million years ago, Earth was populated with a great variety of plants and animals, most notably the grand dinosaurs.
 
The truly miraculous robustness and adaptability of sexual reproduction was again demonstrated after the last environmental Holocaust of 66 million years ago, when 75% of plant and animal species went extinct in a short period of time.
 
66 million years ago, a huge asteroid (15 kilometers across) hit a location in today’s Mexico, creating such a violent explosion that was a billion times stronger than the atom bombs dropped on Japan; or 20 thousand times stronger than the total global nuclear arsenal in existence today! That impact and its after-effects (global incineration of plants, high surface temperature, dense ash clouds and prolonged darkness) destroyed some 99.9% of Earth’s biomass.
 
Ironically, the devastation caused by that asteroid’s Holocaust provided evolutionary opportunities for the most sexual and most intelligent of all the animals, the mammals. In the wake of asteroid impact, almost all the dinosaur species died, but most of the mammal species survived. The ability of mammals to survive that apocalyptic impact depended on well-organized underground living, caring for babies after birth, flexible diet and food storage, suited to surviving on a scorched Earth with minimum and variable food availability.
 
After the asteroid impact’s dust and ash clouds settled, sunshine returned and plant life reappeared on Earth. Then, the original mammals who were small (rat size) underwent remarkable adaptive jumps and prolific divergence into new forms and species that ultimately produced diverse animals, from horses to whales and from bats to primates.
 
Dual Code of Ethics
 
GoLI maintains a dual code of ethics as part of her universal laws. Laws of physics are not broken, but our world is still biased and non-random. In certain locations, order is favored to appear and to evolve, but outside those realms more disorder is generated to pay for the “thermodynamic cost” of the order-growing. One can consider the order-growing realms as Gibbs free-energy traps, where entropy is internally decreasing, at the cost of externally increasing entropy.
 
That preferential treatment is most obvious to us on our beloved planet Earth, where life and evolution has been clearly swimming against the waves of entropy and disorder, for the past 4 billion years. Earth is a giant “free-energy” trap that has consistently absorbed solar energy within its water-based ecosystems. The water-cycle shaped Earth, and life started 4 billion years ago in various bodies of water, only conquering land some 1 billion years ago. From an evolutionary perspective, life on Earth is a gigantic struggle to feed on the manna (free-energy) from heaven.
 
Photosynthesis by plants, algae and planktons is the main way for capturing sun’s energy into Earth’s biosphere. Although only 1% of sun’s solar energy input to Earth is captured by photosynthesis; that still amounts to 2,000 trillion watts. Almost all other creatures and animals that cannot produce their own energy from the solar radiation, have always had to directly or indirectly compete for and feed on the plants or the herbivores. In comparison, all manmade industries consume less than 10 trillion watts of energy, with 99% of that sourced from living plants or dead creatures (fossil fuels).
 
On our Earth, each lifeform is following that dual code of ethics too; i.e. creating internal order by growing and reproducing its selfish genes, at the cost of generating external waste and disorder. However, through 4 billion years of evolution and natural-selection, the prevailing units of evolution on Earth have become its ecosystems, where competing and collaborating lifeforms have maximized order generation and minimized waste and disorder, all within the limits set by the Gibbs free-energy supply from our sun.
 
The selfish dual-code appears to run like a fractal equation throughout the universe, wherever order has been generated and favored to evolve, from quarks and atoms to stars and galaxies. It runs through the human psyche too; where through natural-selection, we have generally evolved to possess the two instinctive forces of amity (Eros) and enmity (Thanatos). As human family groups increased in size, that dual code of ethics came to dominate each group’s relationship vis-à-vis the “insiders” and the “outsiders”. Furthermore, as Darwin pointed out, most violent competition can happen within a species, because related animals often compete for the same resources.
 
25 million years ago, a tailless monkey (Proconsul) with a large brain relative to her body size, emerged to become the ancestor of all apes. 7 million years ago, the Hominina ape came to be the ancestor to both humans and chimpanzees, who have a larynx that can facilitate vocalized speech. 3 million years ago, the genus Homo appeared with a range of sophisticated stone tools that mark their evolutionary path. Homo sapiens emerged only 0.2 million years ago in East Africa.
 
Homo sapiens is clearly the most competitive and unrelenting Homo species, who has driven all its other Homo relatives to extinction. Equipped with big brains and language, Sapiens could create large social groups and tribes. 50 thousand years ago, the co-evolution of genes and cultures became the social-selection force among the Sapiens tribes, resulting in an explosive leap forward and the emergence of abstract thinking and planning, art and ornamentation, exploitation of large animals and hunting technology.
 
Human species have been some of the most social mammals. As such, we have evolved well past our pre-programmed instincts. It does not mean that our instincts are dead, but that our lives cannot be sustained without the much more complex cultural learnings, within a nurturing social setting. Social living in extended families and groups moved the human evolution from species-based to social and culture-based, especially after the language revolution.
 

Good References:

Life in the Universe, by Stephen Hawking. 

The origin of the universe, by Stephen Hawking. 

Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins.

Evolutionary Instability, by Gebhard Geiger, Springer 1990.

A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, by Richard Fortey.

The world until yesterday, by Jared Diamond.